Looks like #Trump is trying to follow #Putin's playbook! More white babies! To hell with everyone else!
Russia Is in Demographic Free Fall. Putin Isn’t Helping.
The Russian president is enacting one of the world’s most extreme natalism programs—and one of the weirdest.
By Anna Nemtsova, April 29, 2025
"Russia was in demographic decline long before the war in Ukraine. Now it’s in free fall.
Since 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians have died or suffered critical injuries in Ukraine. The result: According to one demographer, Russians may have had fewer children from January to March 2025 than in any three-month period over the past 200 years. As of 2023, the country’s fertility rate—1.4 births per woman—lies well below replacement level and amounts to a roughly 20 percent drop compared with 2015. In some regions, births fell that much in just 12 months. Last year, deaths outpaced births by more than half a million.
This crisis has led to one of the world’s most extreme natalism campaigns—and one of the weirdest. President Vladimir Putin has commanded his government to “stimulate” Russian women to have at least three children, and to make sure they get pregnant when they’re young. To that end, the Ministry of Education has been discussing ways to create “conditions for romantic relations” in schools. Last month, Moscow’s Department of Health displayed giant pink banners around the city asking women, How’s it going? Still haven’t given birth?
If this is supposed to make them want to procreate, it doesn’t seem to be working—at least not for Larisa, a 21-year-old university student who was incredulous when she saw the sign on her way to campus. Even though her parents cover the cost of her car and apartment, she told me, “I have enough money to pay just for my food. Forget three babies.” Indeed, the Kremlin’s own polling has shown that almost 40 percent of Russian women of childbearing age say they won’t have kids in the next five years because of financial concerns.
Most of Larisa’s friends are like her: women in their early 20s who came to Moscow to study and start their career. That’s precisely the path that Russian leaders are trying to discourage. Irina Filatova, a member of Parliament, recently warned that young women’s ideas about “self-development” are a threat to Russia’s “traditional family values.” But if they insist on going to college, then at least they should find a husband there, so they “can give birth at age 18 or 19,” another female legislator suggested last year.
To assuage concerns about the cost of having kids, authorities in the Oryol region recently began offering pregnant students $1,200. Daria Yakovleva, a women’s-rights activist, told me that such programs may lead girls to think of childbearing as a ticket to economic security, even though having children in Russia often entrenches poverty. Svetlana Gannushkina witnesses these financial burdens firsthand. A human-rights advocate who served on Russia’s Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, Gannushkina helps low-income families that are unable to provide for their children. She doesn’t see government handouts as a solution. “Paying girls money for pregnancies is a strange approach,” Gannushkina told me.
“Authorities should be forcing men to feel responsible, first of all, but so far, all we hear is demands for women—what women should not do or should do.”
One of Gannushkina’s clients, Takhmina, is pregnant with her eighth child, and her husband makes less than $800 a month. Gannushkina told me that the state was supposed to send them financial aid but has withheld it since a right-wing mob attacked Takhmina’s family online because they’re ethnically Tajik. Evidently, Gannushkina said, “she is not the kind of pregnant woman they want.”"
Read more:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/04/russia-putin-demography-children/682637/
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/mGso7
️
x8 + 
) 